In addition to AECC, which
was established in 1949,
Arkansas' other cooperatives
include Arkansas Electric
Cooperative Inc. (AECI). This
statewide service association
provides construction,
maintenance for rights-of-way,
utility sales, high-voltage
equipment testing, and
communications for member
cooperatives and other power
providers.
AECC is responsible for its
own IT and that for AECI, in
addition to providing support
for a statewide network for other
member cooperatives. AECC IT
staff is responsible for developing
and maintaining a variety of
in-house applications, including
those for utility inventory sales
and services, vendor-managed
inventory, accounting and
finance, work orders, and vehicle,
equipment and job costing, all of
which run on a Power Systems
S814 server running IBM i 7.3
hosted at AECC's headquarters.
Over the past several years,
the organization has undertaken
a massive modernization
effort. This has included using
IBM Rational* Developer for i
for easier coding, converting
traditional RPG applications
to free-format RPG, adopting
free-form RPG as its primary
development language, using PHP
for browser-based applications
and migrating from DDS-based
physical files/logical files to Data
Definition Language source to
take advantage of SQL.
With this has come a wealth
of opportunities to leverage
its homegrown applications,
including for advanced web
and mobile solutions. Already,
it's requiring the use of mobile
devices for employees who
are out in the field working on
transmission lines and in power
plants, for example. The data they
Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation contacted long-time
business partner Botz & Associates for help when it encountered
issues with the lack of single sign-ons between the tablets and
the back-end IBM Power Systems environment.
enter into their supporting mobile
app is synched up from the client
side to the server side when they
have internet connectivity.
Another 60 or so employees
are testing mobile devices for
potential or upcoming projects.
"Our entire IT division is in the
beta test group, a lot of them
just because, being IT people,
they're curious," Harris says.
Re-entering Passwords
And a good thing they are. When
preparing to launch a web-based
app that allowed select personnel,
such as vice presidents, directors,
14 // APRIL 2018 ibmsystemsmag.com
managers and supervisors, to
approve invoices on iPads, the beta
testers came across a major glitch
involving persistent authentication.
"When using a Windows*
browser, you log in through a VPN
to get into the network without
having to sign in every time you
want to interact with the system,"
Harris says. "That wasn't the case
with the iPads."
When users tried to access the
system with Safari, the default iPad
web browser, they had to enter
their IBM i user ID and password
each time they attempted to
connect to the server. This is despite
the Apache web server having
been configured to accept the
authentication protocol Kerberos.
The easy fix would've been
configuring another default
browser, such as Google Chrome,
on each iPad, which indeed
would have worked. "We have
authentication that works
with Chrome," Harris says. But
every time someone received
a business-related email and
hit a link pointing back to the
Power Systems server, Safari would
launch and the user would have to
re-enter his ID and password.
"We already knew we might
face a hurdle when launching
this app, but it wouldn't have
been accepted at all if people
had to re-enter their credentials
whenever they needed to